ABSTRACT. This paper engages with Vanessa Cameron-Lewis and Carl Mika’s call for affirmative difference through the Māori concept of whakapapa, not as a static genealogy but as a metaphysical force that animates notions of place, being and belonging. Unlike dominant western models of difference premised on identity, hierarchy and categorical separation, whakapapa (‘genealogy, kinship’) configures our existence as co-emergent, ancestral and relational. It is not simply a record of descent, but a mode of world-making in which life and death are not opposing states, but co-implicated conditions of our ontology. In this way, whakapapa unsettles the life/death binary that underwrites much of western taxonomy. Drawing on Alphonso Lingis’s account of suffering – the affective pull to be-with others in grief and loss – I suggest that Māori relational metaphysics affirms life not as the possession of an individuated subject, but as a shared, continual substantiation enacted through others, living, dead and more-than-human. Whakapapa, then, is not simply about connection. It is the activity of continuity. The pulse of our sovereignty in the cadence of time-being. Through a conceptual conversation between whakapapa, whakawhanaungatanga (the practice of relation) and Lingis’s (2000) notions of embodiment, this paper offers an account of affirmative difference as antithetical to Indigenous existence. Indigenous metaphysics are not positioned as an alternative to western metaphysics here, but as a mode of thought that merely renders its limits visible – especially where it presumes the separability of life/death and being/relation: pairings, if not differences, that reveal demarcations of our incommensurable sovereignties as Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

 

Keywords: Deleuze; sovereignty; mortality; taxonomy; epistemic war 

 

How to cite: McKinnon, K. D. (2025). Ka mate, ka ora and the presumption of difference. Knowledge Cultures, 13(3), 135–152. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc133202510

 

Received September 30, 2025 • Received in revised form November 14, 2025

Accepted November, 14, 2025 • Available online December 1, 2025